The present application relates to an improved system and method of determining the position and orientation of a remote object.
A typical system for determining the position and orientation of a remote object includes a receiver with three receiver coils that are orthogonal to one another, and a transmitter with three transmitter coils that carry sinusoidal currents operative to generate electromagnetic fields defining a reference coordinate system. The receiver, which is associated with the remote object, is operative to measure the voltage induced in each receiver coil by the electromagnetic fields. There are nine such induced voltages, and the output of each receiver coil is the sum of three of these voltages. The measured values of the induced voltages are employed to determine the position and orientation of the remote object relative to the reference coordinates defined by the electromagnetic fields.
The design of such a conventional system for determining the position and orientation of a remote object poses a number of challenges, including at least the following:
1. separating the three signals received at each receiver coil to determine their three individual amplitudes;
2. doing that separation without any connection from the transmitter clock source to the receiver, as such, a connection is undesirable for reasons of cost and connectivity;
3. generating the transmitter electromagnetic fields at acceptable cost, and tolerant to variations in component values from manufacturing tolerance, aging, and temperature change;
4. providing a mechanism by which any receiver may be used with any transmitter without prior calibration by determining channel calibration from ordinary measurement data; and
5. compacting the transmitter coils for some applications so that they are coplanar yet can still generate electromagnetic fields that define a two or three-dimensional coordinate system.
It would be desirable to have improved systems and methods of determining the position and orientation of a remote object that provide solutions to these challenges.